Back in 2012, I was at the Tech@State conference listening to the CIA's Sean Dennehy give a presentation about using Intellipedia (a set of wikis for the US intelligence community) to help knowledge-sharing across organizatio...

Net Neutrality is a key to having an open Internet. Without it, telecom companies have the power to decide who is and isn't allowed to have a business online. (Hint: if you compete with them, the answer is "no." Hint #2: if your business is successful, expect them to ask you for a "tax" for the answer to be yes. Hint #3: expect that tax to be a significant percentage of your income.) They also get the power to do far more sinister things -- like read and modify the web pages you see in order to insert anything from tracking to ads, or even hijack your traffic outright.

Net Neutrality isn't "Obamacare for the Internet," as Senator Cruz seems to think. It's making sure that a handful of the most unpleasant bastards in the country don't have veto power over your ability to start a business or take your business to whomever you please.

Fortunately, +Matthew Inman has a great explanation of what Net Neutrality actually means.

It's really about crab tacos.

(Incidentally, I was very glad to hear Obama's statement about it earlier today. "Reclassification" is a technical term, but it basically means that cable companies have to treat everyone's traffic the same, and aren't allowed to boost their friends and harm their enemies. It's the regulatory banhammer that the cable companies were being threatened with if they didn't actually regulate their own behavior the way they said they would -- which, in the Netflix incident, they decidedly didn't.)﻿

There is some fascinating chemistry behind the colour of blood - and not just vertebrate's red blood.

The blood molecule we're most familiar with is haemoglobin, which is (this is not in the article, BTW) composed of four haem (or heme) protein molecules. A haem has an iron(II) ion in its center, tied to it by four coordinate bonds. Coordination chemistry plays an important role with the other three types of blood mentioned in the article and on the infographic.

There’s nothing more irritating than the evasive non-answers politicians mete out for the press and public. Education, budget, jobs—the words get thrown around a lot (and always in positive terms), but candidates are cagey and it’s nearly impossible to cut through their bullshit. If the voters want to know who these people really are, we have to ask the tough questions. Questions like…
Are you a fucking replicant?!?
Of course, no prospective ...